by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. â?? Almost every March, a team from a little-known conference busts through the NCAA Tournament bracket and America temporarily falls in love. But when Northern Illinois weaved its way through the BCS formula to earn an Orange Bowl bid against ACC champion Florida State, the reaction was largely based in contempt.

"The fact Northern Illinois is in the BCS in 2012 is really a sad state for college football," ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit ranted shortly after the pairing was announced. "They don't deserve to be in the BCS this year."

But Herbstreit and anyone who shares his view better get used to it, because Tuesday night may not have been the last time a Cinderella team from a lesser conference shows up in a major bowl.

When the new postseason implemented in 2014, six bowl games will stand above the rest, two of which will serve as national semifinals on a rotating basis. The other four will choose teams based largely on contractual agreements with conferences; the Sugar Bowl, for instance, will match a Southeastern Conference team against a Big 12 team in years when it isn't a semifinal site. But one slot each year will be reserved in one of those four bowls for the highest-rated champion from the so-called "Group of Five" conferences: The Big East, the Mountain West, the MAC, the Sun Belt and Conference USA.

And in theory, that may mean even lower bar some years than what Northern Illinois had to reach to get into the Orange Bowl.

Northern Illinois got into a BCS game because it finished among the top-16 in the BCS standings (the Huskies were 15th) and ahead of the champion from an automatic qualifying conference (Big East winner Louisville was 21st and Big Ten winner Wisconsin was 16th). So even though Northern Illinois lost to Iowa in the season opener and didn't face a ranked team until beating fellow MAC member Kent State in the league championship game, it met the criteria established in 2006 for BCS busters. There was no way to keep the Huskies out.

In college basketball, the matchup of a hot mid-major and a brand-name program would have been celebrated. Quarterback Jordan Lynch, who threw for 24 touchdowns and ran for 19 more this season, would have been hyped as a must-see attraction against a Florida State defense loaded with future NFL players. But because Northern Illinois getting in stopped a traditional power like Oklahoma from getting a BCS bid, some commentators â?? Herbstreit the most prominent among them â?? painted the Huskies as an uninvited guest.

"Yeah, that doesn't bother us at all," Northern Illinois quarterbacks coach Bob Cole told reporters this week. "There's a lot of angry people out there, but there's probably 120 of us in the hotel that are really happy about the whole deal. We don't really care what everybody else thinks. We're glad to be here. We won a lot of games, and we did what we were supposed to do."

Starting in 2014, however, such complaining could be amplified even more. Though exact criteria for choosing the Group of Five representative haven't been established yet, if a 9-3 Boise State team is the highest-rated team among those five conference champions, they're in. If it's 11-1 Louisiana-Lafayette, they're in. So for leagues like the MAC, which historically couldn't get teams high enough in the polls to be in BCS contention, the chances of this happening again are better than ever.

In the college football paradigm, Florida State-Northern Illinois may not have been a sexy Orange Bowl matchup. But in the new playoff world, something similar will probably become commonplace in at least one major bowl every year.